Posted on 07/18/2004 9:38:30 AM PDT by FlJoePa
No ordinary JoePa
Sunday, July 18, 2004
BY BOB FLOUNDERS
Of The Patriot-News
What we think we know about Joe Paterno should be enough.
He is college football's most recognizable face and arguably its greatest ambassador.
He has made central Pennsylvania his home for 54 years and 607 games.
He is Brooklyn born and proud of it.
He is 170 or so pounds of defiance on game day.
He has made white socks and rolled-up sleeves a fashion statement.
And during his 39-year tenure as Penn State head coach, he has won. Won huge.
Paterno's slate reads 339 victories against only 109 defeats, five undefeated seasons and two national championships. Until last season, he was Division I's all-time winningest coach.
But there is so much more to Angelo and Florence Paterno's son that isn't common knowledge. His true impact might be incalculable.
That might explain why Penn State handed a four-year contract to a 77-year-old coach who produced only three victories last season.
"How many universities would do that? You tell me one more," Paterno said.
For decades, Paterno's presence has been felt in many corners.
It's felt in boardrooms, where he beats the drums for PSU's causes, helping to raise, by conservative estimates, more than $1 billion for the university.
It's felt in classrooms, where he holds his players to the highest standards, an approach that has yielded an 86 percent graduation rate in the 2003 NCAA Graduation Rates Report, 85 percent for African-Americans.
It's felt in living rooms, where some of his former students pass on his tough-love mantra.
And sometimes, Paterno's impact can be felt in hospital rooms.
Ryan Hockensmith never played football for Paterno; he merely covered it for Penn State's student newspaper in autumn 1999.
That is, until he was waylaid by a deadly illness, meningococcal meningitis.
Hockensmith's is a complicated story, a life-death battle he nearly lost. There have been countless operations with more to come. He has lost toes and seen his fingers blacken.
Pain is pretty much constant.
Yet at 26, Hockensmith is an upbeat spirit, married and living in Queens and writing for ESPN Magazine.
Five years ago, though, his mood was quite different.
"I had just had some surgeries, and I was just devastated," Hockensmith said. "But I will never forget that day the phone rang in my house."
It was Joe Paterno calling from San Antonio, taking a break from Alamo Bowl preparations.
"For him to call me from Texas, when I was at the absolute lowest point of my life, I can't tell you what that meant," Hockensmith said. "He talked about the time that his son, David, had been injured [in a trampoline accident] and how it was a real blow and how families had to pull together."
Shortly after the call, Hockensmith received a package in the mail -- an authentic PSU helmet with the players' signatures on it, linebacker LaVar Arrington's and defensive end Courtney Brown's included. It was a gift from Paterno.
That is just one tale. About one get-well-soon phone call to a student whom Paterno didn't know and the relationship that blossomed from it. The two stay in touch to this day, the old man always wanting to know the young man's progress after surgery.
Now think about how many players Paterno has coached. And the players' relatives. And friends of Paterno's family.
And you wonder: How many phone calls have there been like this one over the last 40 years?
He'll do it his way:
To say Paterno enjoys winning isn't quite accurate. It never has been.
Since Rip Engle -- the PSU coach he succeeded and his football coach at Brown University -- talked him out of a law career more than 50 years ago, Paterno has been obsessed with winning a certain way.
His way. And to him, the only way.
Paterno insists academics and athletics be married. His players must be students first. They must work hard in the classroom. They are allowed to cut class, but only if they understand that they will never see the field if they do.
There are no shortcuts. There are no exceptions. They must realize they might run 4.5 seconds in the 40-yard dash, but they are no different than any other undergraduates.
"We do have an obligation to use athletics as a means for kids to do some things that go beyond just performing as undergraduates and who will go on and have an opportunity to do some things with their lives," Paterno said during a recent press stop in Austin, Texas.
The trade-off is that not all of Paterno's recruits are five-star talents. In a day when most coaches tend to design their systems around dozens of great athletes, Paterno has always, always demanded his players fit his system.
Yes, Paterno recruits speed and size.
Character comes with it almost every time.
He has coached his share of stars. But on close examination, it's blue-collar types who have formed the backbone of Paterno's finest teams.
For every Arrington, there are five John Shaffers.
For every Larry Johnson, PSU's only 2,000-yard rusher, there are 10 Greg Garritys.
Shaffer didn't have a big-time arm. All he did was quarterback the Lions' last national championship team.
Garrity was supposedly too small and too slow. All he did was catch the winning touchdown pass to give Paterno his first national championship.
"[Paterno] makes you accountable," said Penn State tackle Levi Brown.
"You do it right, then Joe will do anything for you," said former tackle Irv Pankey.
Pankey is no ordinary alum. He played a dozen seasons in the National Football League, a standout left tackle for the Los Angeles Rams and Indianapolis Colts.
But he went to PSU in the mid-1970s like many other Paterno recruits, bright and eager -- and in need of shaping.
He vividly remembers his recruiting trip to Penn State some 30 years ago. He hated it.
Now it is one of his favorite stories.
"I was being recruited back in a time when recruiting trips sometimes meant nice hotels and limousine rides," said Pankey, 46, an assistant football coach at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, Calif.
"And I get to Penn State, and Joe has us staying in the dorms with a player, sleeping on a little cot," he laughed.
"There were no bells and whistles. He wanted you to know what to expect."
Paying it forward:
Pankey has twin sons, gearing up for their sophomore year of high school. Pankey raised them using some of the values Paterno instilled, he said.
Both are football players. And Pankey hopes both of them will end up heading east for college -- to you-know-where.
"Looking back on it, I had my run-ins at Penn State, just like a lot of young kids," Pankey said. "But Penn State is where I became a man."
Throw together thousands of young men ages 18 to 22 and free them from parental constraints, and invariably there will be a little trouble.
Biochemistry majors turned loose on spring break find it. College football players find it, too.
Paterno has ways of dealing with players in trouble, and none of them is pleasant. He said it's become a much bigger issue with today's media but believes most of the shenanigans, especially the underage drinking and the fighting, are no more prevalent than they were 30 years ago.
"That doesn't mean I have more misbehaved kids," Paterno said. "Hey, I'll go back to a couple of guys that ... I had in the 1970s that were nuts."
Back then, the phone would ring at the Paterno house in the middle of the night. The coach would be informed of a problem with a few of his players, go pick them up, put them to bed in his house, and "run their rear ends off the next day."
Former Harrisburg High star Shawn Lee fought Paterno's preachings initially.
But after a year or so, a light went on inside Lee. Paterno had begun to make sense.
A player who was always late for team meetings began showing up 15 minutes early. As his academics improved, he made the grade as a three-year starter.
Today, Lee, 28, works for a juvenile facility in the Harrisburg area, and every year, his kids trek to State College.
"When we go up there, he'll see me, and he'll come out of his office, and he'll speak to the kids," Lee said of Paterno. "He'll get a hold of them, and he'll tell a story, always with a point. I know he cares."
Like Pankey, Lee finds himself passing Paterno's way forward.
He tells the kids at his facility to be on time. He tells them to study. He tells them to make sure they eat breakfast every day, just as Paterno told Lee.
"I think most of my maturing as a person came during those years [at Penn State]," Lee said.
"He did more for me than anyone, and I also like the way he stressed education and family ahead of football," said former PSU linebacker great Jack Ham, who asked Paterno -- not Pittsburgh Steelers coach Chuck Noll -- to give his induction speech into the National Football League Hall of Fame.
"[Paterno] was not involved in making a camaraderie thing with his players," said former PSU radio broadcaster Fran Fisher.
"His charge was to educate them and to make them the best football players."
Billion-dollar man:
To educate them best, Paterno knew the university needed the best resources -- improved facilities and better teachers. A significant upgrade was required.
The university needed money. A lot of money. And over the years, he has helped to raise an obscene amount.
Paterno and his wife, Sue, have given the university more than $4 million of their money, and recently he was a key figure in a university fund-raising drive that netted $1.4 billion.
More than 20 years ago, he teamed with then-university president Bryce Jordan to complete Penn State's first historic fund-raiser.
Jordan hoped to raise $200 million, the largest fund raising ever attempted by a public university at the time.
With Paterno's help, the school ended up with more than $300 million.
"Joe was in the middle of all of it," said Jordan, 79, who lives in Austin, Texas. "He was the vice chairman for that drive. I can remember anything we asked him to do, he did."
Paterno shows a different face during fund-raisers. He might be a taskmaster during practices, but he is a charmer to those with deep pockets.
"I know he actually closed some of the agreements and deals from some of our larger donors," Jordan said.
Even this summer, he's turning his charms on voters, as he beats the campaign trail for his son, Scott, the Republican candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill County, in the fall.
"Scott's running for Congress," Paterno said, "and he's requested I do a few things for him, so it's going to be an awfully short summer."
College football coaches tend to wear many hats. Paterno wears more than any.
His title reads coach. You can add father figure. And don't forget about fund-raiser, wooer of moms and dads and, as Hockensmith can attest, humanitarian.
A few regrets:
With all that on his plate, something must get lost along the way.
For Paterno, it's personal time. He has no hobbies, eschewing golf when the first of his five kids arrived.
Personal time eventually bleeds into family time. There is regret in every life, and for Paterno's children, some of it is they didn't see much of him growing up. They still don't see much of him.
He's either on the practice field, or in the film room, or on the sidelines, or on the recruiting trail.
Or, you know, out there seconding former President George Bush's nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention.
Twenty-four hours only go so far.
"I wasn't always OK with it," said Jay Paterno, one of Joe's three sons and PSU's quarterbacks coach.
"I can remember when I was a senior at State College [High School] and I had a football banquet and my dad couldn't be there because it was the Friday before we played Pitt.
"Obviously, I understood that, but it didn't make me happy."
"I notice it now more than ever," said Mary Katherine Hort, Joe's daughter.
"I particularly notice it when he's around his grandchildren, my kids," said Hort, who is married with three children and living in the State College area. "They want his attention when they see him, and sometimes other people are around and they don't get it."
This is not to suggest that the Paterno kids never saw their dad. Hort said her mom always held dinner, no matter how late practice was running, to make sure the family ate together.
And when Paterno was around, he was anything but a larger-than-life personality.
"[We] know where all the warts are," Jay Paterno said. "We know that he doesn't make the bed or he doesn't pick things up. To me, he's the guy who orders the pizza and leaves the box [lying] around."
Fisher senses regret inside Paterno. He said the passing of George Paterno, Joe's younger brother and Fisher's radio sidekick, deeply affected the coach. George Paterno died at 73 in 2002.
"I think, to this day, Joe feels a certain amount of guilt for not having discovered George's physical difficulties quicker than he did," Fisher said.
"Of course, you had to know George. He's sitting up there in Long Island doing his thing. He's not going to call brother Joe and say, 'Joe, I'm not feeling well.' But when Joe discovered that he was ill and, to an extent, seriously ill, then Joe sent a plane to get him and put him in a hospital.
"I think from that point on, Joe felt as though he should have known and done something quicker."
Real worth:
Paterno ultimately did recover, guiding his team to nine wins that fall and a bowl appearance. The 2002 season is the lone bright spot for the program in the last four years. After the 2003 debacle, some were calling for Paterno's job.
That talk infuriated some of the players on Paterno's early teams.
"I think he deserves to be there as long as he wants," said Mike Irwin, a running back and captain on the 1966 team.
"He's earned the right [to stay]," said former PSU star linebacker Dennis Onkotz, a leader of the Lions' unbeaten 1968-69 teams. "He's built this thing, and he's going to pass it on."
But why stay at the age of 77, with the option to stay until 81?
For Paterno's it's not so much about his legacy. It could be he has yet to experience anything like the feeling of game day.
"I don't know if you can imagine coming out of a tunnel with a bunch of kids [who] have worked their butts off all week and are playing against a really good, tough football team," Paterno said. "And there's 105,000 people watching, [wondering] whether you can put up or not."
Onkotz, 56, who lives in Boalsburg, near State College, said it's not just the university that's indebted to Paterno; it's the entire region.
"Every time you fly over State College, all you see is the different highways that now connect through State College," Onkotz said.
"It wasn't always that way," he said. "The stadium used to hold 43,000, now it's over 100,000. Tickets used to be five or six bucks, now they're outrageous.
"What do you think all the hotels are here for? ... A lot of wealth has come into this area because of that man."
Almost none of which can be measured in dollars and cents.
BOB FLOUNDERS: 255-8181 or bflounders@patriot-news.com
I'd like to think there are more Joe's out there, but...
BTW, this was meant for chat. I sure hope that's where it's going. If not please move if need be mods. thanks.
I was fortunate enough to meet JoePa when I was an Asst. Prof. of Military Science at PSU in the early 90's through my next door neighbor, who happened to be his audiologist. When I was re-assigned to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico he sent a note to my son, unsolicited, to say "Mark, Good Luck in New Mexico, Joe Paterno". Class guy....and I can say that even as a lifetime Notre Dame fan.
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